Wednesday, 4 March 2015

Author Interview ~ Linda Holeman

Linda Holeman is the author of
The Devil on Her Tongue and The Lost Souls of Angelkov, as well as the
internationally bestselling historical novels The Linnet Bird, The Moonlit
Cage, In a Far Country and The Saffron Gate, and eight other works of fiction and
short fiction. Her books have been translated into seventeen
languages. A world traveller, she grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
currently lives in Toronto.

Linda welcome to Jaffareadstoo and thank you for taking the time to talk to us about

The Lost Souls of Angelkov.

What gave you the idea for
writing The Lost Souls of Angelkov?

- The genesis of the novel comes from a few snippets of my own
Russian family history. My grandmother and her family were peasants, living
outside of Odessa - which was part of Russia in the early 20th
century. At ten years old, she was on the dirt road outside her home with her
five-year old brother. Men on horseback thundered by and scooped up her little
brother, riding off with him. He was never seen again, and my grandmother
couldn’t remember any details of searching for him or understanding why he was
taken. As I worked on my story I wondered if the men – my grandmother had
described them as Tatars or Cossacks - were stealing boys to add to their
numbers to create a larger band of boy soldiers. My grandmother told me that
story a number of times when I was very young, and I was thrilled and horrified
by it, and it stayed with me always. As a writer, it was just too rich a part
of my own family history to ignore. And so I used that one fact – a kidnapped
boy – and created a story of a stolen child of an aristocratic Russian family,
set amidst the chaos and ruin brought about by the 1861 serf emancipation.

Are you a plotter, or a
start-writing-and-see-where-it-takes-you sort of writer?

- I’m a combination of the two. I always have a vague plotline and
ideas for main characters to start with, but can never actually do a
chapter-by-chapter plan, as my research constantly takes me in different
directions. In Lost Souls, I knew the book would open with a child being stolen
and at the end he would be recovered. I knew I wanted the story to take part
during the serf emancipation, and that my protagonist was once wealthy and
entitled, and her fight to find her child and the loss of the world she once
knew would be her arc. Apart from that I basically just kept the faith as I sat
down to write each day, and built on what the characters said and did, and what
I uncovered in my on-going research to keep moving forward.

What was the most
difficult aspect of writing the story? How did you overcome it?

- As I find with the writing of any historic novel, making sure
there is factual research to anchor the fictional story can prove difficult,
especially in certain periods of history. I found that while there are many,
many books on interesting political eras in Russia, I couldn’t find anything
fictional written specifically about the actual events taking place during the
Serf Emancipation of 1861. This particular time — moving from the centuries-old
order of master and serf to the new order of freedom — was rich and full of
intrigue. The political and societal changes affected not just the serfs, but
the aristocracy and wealthy landowners who depended on the serfs to help run
their land and lives. While researching the years surrounding 1861 in great
depth, I also discovered a mention of serf orchestras. This was highly exciting
to me because I hadn’t heard of them before, and knew I’d have to use that…but
again, finding enough information to be able to write about serf orchestras
knowledgably and convincingly was a huge challenge. On a much smaller note,
getting all the Russian names right – every Russian has at least four variations
on given and family names– kept me on my toes. Again, the only way to overcome
this difficulty is with endless, endless research and rechecking.

Your writing is very
atmospheric – how do you “set the scene” in your novels and how much research did
you need to do in order to bring The Lost
Souls of Angelkov to life?

- With historical fiction, I find it takes me as long — or perhaps
longer — to do the research as it takes me to write the novel. The research
never ends; there seems to be something to confirm right until the manuscript
goes to print. First, I find as much information as I can about the country and
the era I’ve chosen for my novel, although the information keeps coming
continually through the entire writing. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a lot
written about a certain period in a certain part of the world, as I mention
above. But I like the challenge of digging up out-of-print books and finding
tiny but interesting particulars unexpectedly. I read non-fiction for the facts
and fiction more for issues such as social context. I try to time it so that
partway into the writing of the novel I do my travel research. It works for me to
experience the country at this stage, because by then I’ve explored a great
deal through my reading. This means I already have certain knowledge of what to
expect, and I also know what I’m hoping or need to uncover for my own story.
The plot and characters are established, although still fluid, because I’ve
come to understand that the travel will create changes. Much of what I’ve
written is confirmed, but there are always surprises, and it’s these surprises
that can take the novel in another direction. For example, when working on The Lost Souls of Angelkov, I wasn’t
planning to have any of my characters Siberian. But as I travelled through that
part of the world, I was so taken by Siberia’s austere beauty and the
distinctness of its people that I knew, as my train rumbled along, that it
would be Grisha’s homeland. So I wrote a whole new weave into the novel after
returning home.

Do you write the type of
books you like to read and which authors have influenced you?

- It’s pretty impossible to write well in a genre unless you know it
in great depth from your own reading of it, so the answer is yes, I’ve always liked
to read historic fiction. I particularly like – in both reading and in my own
writing - uncovering historic events and circumstances which aren’t well known.
This is what happened when I was writing TheLost Souls of Angelkov: the time of
the emancipation with its confusion and anarchy and changing roles kept getting
more complex the deeper I went.

As to which authors have influenced me…there are so, so many, and in
different genres throughout my lifetime of intense reading. But off the top of
my head, the historic novels which have stayed with me for the last few years,
and which I got completely lost in, were The
Dress Lodger, by Sheri Holman, The
Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber, The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd, and The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman. That’s just the tip of the
iceberg.

What’s next?

- Sorry…the work-in-progress is too new for me to start talking
about – or it might lose its magic!!